For those who do want to know, here goes...
The theatre was relatively small - maybe a little bit more seating than the theatre in the Arts Centre in Melbourne where they showed “Songs for Nobodies” in terms of seating. There were seats all the way around except at the opposite end to the entrance. There was also a large pool of water in the middle of the room.
Like I said, the show was supposed to start at 5pm, but people kept coming, so the show didn’t start. The room was dark & had what looked like hanging lattices covered with foliage suspended over the water. There was a little junk that sailed across the water from time to time at the back of the theatre. There were also towels on the seats. Hmm...interesting.
One thing I did notice was that the amount of talking in the theatre was quite loud. I expected it to stop once the show started, but no such luck. In fact, it seemed to me that the louder the music got, the louder the voices of the people. However, given that it was in a language I didn’t understand, it was not as distracting as it could have been.
Besides, who knows what was being said? Maybe they were expressing their wonder and delight. Loudly. Over and over again. Constantly .Who am I to judge? I was glad of the volume of the music and the wonder of the show. The lights went out and a voiceover said, among other things that the people in the first three rows may be splashed by an insubstantial amount of water - okay, even more interesting.
It started with a little fisher boy on a raft/boat using a pole to push and steer his boat along in a city - I assume Macau or Hong Kong? Then thunder sounds and he falls off, there’s mist and loud music and as we watch he appears atop what seems to be a masthead, rising up out of the water.
Everyone is so engrossed with this almost larger than possible contraption that we don’t notice the “ghosts” that crawl out of the water and jump in our faces until they do and there is a collective scream in the theatre. Having elicited the expected reaction and giving us the death stare for good measure, they float away into the water and start climbing the structure resembling the mast of a ship.
They then start to jump off and we discover what the towels are for. They really should have given us plastic ponchos and just as I’m thinking I can’t do one and a half hours of this, some of the ghosts execute intricate twists and turns and land in the water with barely a plop that wouldn’t look out of place in any Olympic diving event. Over and over the ghosts climb and dive. When the ghosts decided their graceful dives were not causing enough splash, literally, they would splash water deliberately or climb up in front of us and shake their wet hair at us.
Over the next few acts, we discover that there is another guy who falls in love with a girl locked in a cage. He attempts to rescue her, and during his quest, we come across a wide variety of characters. Swans, who belong to the captive girl, men dressed in leather looking skin tight pants and little else on top, girls dressed in skimpy outfits who belong to an evil queen of sorts, captive men used as sex slaves in what appeared to be quite a demonstrative dance/act, what appeared to be the entire Brazilian soccer team, and wait for it, motorcross riders!! Yup, they had four (or five?) motorcyclists who revved up and and across the ramps set up.
It was a truly spectacular spectacular! I loved the seat I had, and would recommend it as THE seat to be in - except maybe take a rain poncho with you!
